Canonical (company)
London-based software company, developer of Ubuntu
Canonical Ltd. is a privately held company supporting computer software, based in London, England. It was founded and funded by South African entrepreneur Mark Shuttleworth to market commercial support and related services for the operating system Ubuntu, and related projects. Canonical employs staff in more than 70 countries and maintains offices in London, Austin, Boston, Shanghai, Beijing, Taipei, Tokyo and the Isle of Man.
Projects
Canonical Ltd. has created and continues to back several projects. Principally these are free and open-source software (FOSS) or tools designed to improve collaboration between free software developers and contributors. Some projects require a Contributor License Agreement to be signed.
Open-source software
Ubuntu, a Debian-based Linux distribution with GNOME (formerly with Unity) desktop
Ubuntu Core, a tiny and transactional version of Ubuntu
GNU Bazaar, a decentralized revision control system
Storm, an object-relational mapper for Python, part of the Launchpad code base
Juju, a service orchestration management tool
MAAS, a bare-metal server provisioning tool
cloud-init, the de facto standard for the initial setup of virtual machines in the cloud
U1DB, a cross-platform, cross-device, and syncable database application programming interface (API), allowing for applications to store JSON documents and synchronize them between machines and devices
Upstart, a discontinued event-based replacement for the init daemon
Quickly, a framework for creating software programs for Linux
Ubiquity and Subiquity, operating system installers for Ubuntu
Mir, a computer display server
MicroK8s, an implementation of Kubernetes (since December 2018)
Snap, a package management system for Ubuntu and other Linux operating systems
Snapcraft, a Python-based tool for packaging software
Launchpad, a centralised website containing several component web applications designed to make collaboration between free software projects easier:
PPA, a special software repository for uploading software packages to be built and published as an APT repository,
Blueprints, a tool for planning features of software,
Code, a hosting of Bazaar branches,
Answers, a support tracker,
Rosetta, an online language translation tool to help localisation of software (cf. the Rosetta Stone),
Malone (as in "Bugsy Malone"), a collaborative bug-tracker that allows linking to other bug-trackers,
Soyuz, a tool for creating custom-distributions, such as Kubuntu and Xubuntu.
“Canonical (company)” enters the record as london-based software company, developer of Ubuntu. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Canonical, company and London-based can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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“Canonical (company)” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Canonical, company and London-based provides the most credible route into that argument.
Datasets, specimens, observations and peer-reviewed methods provide the appropriate test for the technical claims summarized here. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 22, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q39064. 1 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2018.
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This entry incorporates text from “Canonical (company)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.